Normal monsters and monstrous monstrosities : a response to Cary Wolfe

Cary Wolfe's response to "The Posthumanism to Come" revolves primarily around two central contentions: (1) that my article draws upon a number of Derridean principles to which Wolfe is equally and explicitly committed; and (2) this shared affinity with Derrida neutralizes in advance my suggestion that Wolfe fosters a progressive or perfectionist rhetoric. Certainly he and I do agree on a number of points, from the political and ethical urgency of affirming the precarity, passivity, and vulnerability to finitude that we share with animals, to the rejection of the humanist presumption that language, suffering, death, and mourning are exclusively human phenomena. Indeed, "The Posthumanism to Come" not only concedes this mutual debt to Derrida but it also acknowledges that What is Posthumanism? theorizes posthumanism in terms of a disjunctive temporality whereby "it comes both before and after humanism," thus apparently marking a departure from the logic of historical rupture that characterized some of Wolfe's earlier work.1 Summarizing this view, I write that "the posthuman is also the antehuman, the animality that 'precedes' the historical elevation of the human above all other life forms."2 Wolfe is therefore absolutely correct that his book explicitly argues against both perfectionism and the belief that posthumanism can fully separate itself from humanism.